ABSTRACT: Much of what makes Hayek so controversial can be found in The Road to Serfdom, the theoretical basis of which is provided by The Counter-Revolution of Science. The Road to Serfdom, a polemic against the “planning mentality,” did not defend complete laissez faire, but argued that planning disrupts the coordination between prices and supply and demand; that effective planning is thus impossible in a modern industrial society; that it is coercive; and, of course, that it leads to totalitarianism. In The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek argued that the “planning mentality” is the result of the hubristic attempt to reconstruct society along scientific lines. But the likes of Edward Bellamy envisioned a planned but free society, while John Dewey contrasted planning, where people collectively choose their goals, against a planned economy that is coercively imposed. Hayek’s welcome strictures against a scientistic society and an overly ambitious social science aside, his binary approach to intellectual history distorted through oversimplification.

In the world colonized by the Myth of Free Market Capitalism’s emanciptory potential, a la Smith of ‘The Wealth of Nations’, it is necessary that we defer to profit, as the only viable approach to the ‘management’ of the Economy! The uncomfortable question arises, where has that led us? All of this outside of the democratic process, that otherwise is the model of the ‘Western Democracies’ : ignore, at our collective peril, the failure of that Myth and point to Jeremy Corbyn as the problem, in the face of a Conservative leadership characterized as incompetent, spineless and self-serving. You fail to make the critical distinction between the Planned Economy and the Planning Economy. Perhaps, an alien concept to you and to this newspaper’s editors.